Teaching Abortion in Bible and Religious Studies Courses

The debate over abortion ethics, law, and policy in the contemporary United States is inescapably Bible-centered. That is not to say that biblical literature contains in-depth discussion of abortion, or that it provides particularly clear and compelling arguments for or against abortion. Neither of these is true, and yet “the Bible” is continually pulled into the cultural and political fray.[1] Thus, it is well within the purview of the biblical or religious studies classroom to cover what biblical texts do say about abortion, what the Bible is perceived to say, and how that discrepancy came to be.

When a draft of the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked prior to the official decision in the Spring of 2022, I was teaching a course at Stanford called “Bible, Politics, and the Internet.” It should go without saying that I had already planned a class session on abortion and reproductive politics, but in the wake of this momentous event my students and I agreed this topic deserved a more thorough treatment. The lesson plans are appropriate for undergraduates at all levels.

Session One: Abortion in the Ancient World and What the Bible Does (and Doesn’t) Say About It

As implied above, there is significant discrepancy between what many people think the Bible says about abortion and what biblical texts actually say. To put a finer point on it, I have found that most people in the United States believe the Bible somewhere contains a clear and forceful prohibition of abortion. Among my students—Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and irreligious alike—this belief was universal.

The only problem is that biblical literature says very little about abortion, and what it does say is neither clear nor relevant to our modern social and political concerns. I wanted my students to understand this, and I suspected the lesson would land better if they discovered it for themselves instead of taking my word for it.

The Exercise

For the first of the two class sessions, I assigned the students Robert Biggs’s essay “Conception, Contraception, and Abortion in Ancient Mesopotamia.”[2] I wanted students to understand that abortion and other methods of fertility management were practiced as part of reproductive health care throughout the ancient Mesopotamian and Mediterranean world.

Along with the article, I assigned the students a list of biblical passages that have been used to condemn or support abortion. I collected these by Googling variations on the theme of “what does the Bible say about abortion?” and extracting any biblical texts quoted or cited in the resulting articles and websites. The preponderance of these sources opposed abortion, but I made sure to find and include texts from some that argued for its permissibility as well. I gave the students only the (English) chapter and verse citations and asked them to look up each one, so they would have access to the surrounding context if the verse(s) were unclear or confusing. The list I compiled included the following texts:

• Gen 1:26–28

• Gen 2:6–7

• Ex 21:22–25

• Num 5:11–31

• Isa 1:17

• Isa 49:1

• Isa 58:6–10

• Jer 1:4–5

• Ezek 37:4–6

• Ps 137:3–5

• Ps 139:13–16

• Prov 24:11–12

• Prov 31:8

• Job 10:11–12

• Luke 1:15

• Luke 1:44–45

• Gal 1:15

I instructed the students to read the passages with two questions in mind:

1. Does this text relate to the ethics of abortion directly?

2. Does this text treat ethical issues that inform the debate over abortion, even if it does not relate to abortion directly?

In class (over Zoom because I had come down with COVID), I shared a Google doc with all of the passages—this time with the text included—so that the students could look through them together. I divided students into breakout rooms of three or four to discuss their answers to the guiding questions. To a person, they all agreed that none of the passages dealt directly with the topic of abortion. I allowed some space here for the students to express and process their surprise. All of them had assumed that the Bible, somewhere, took a clear and decisive position on abortion. Otherwise, why would this of all issues become such a dominant preoccupation of religious (and especially Christian) conservatives?

I found it interesting that my students did not readily interpret the Sotah ritual in Num, 5:11–31 as referring to abortion. Strictly speaking, the Sotah is an infidelity test, but a positive result involves the discharge of uterine contents and permanent infertility. Thus, if the woman’s extramarital sex had led to a pregnancy, it would necessarily be aborted in the process. I think the motivations, methods, and purpose of that ritual made it illegible to them as an abortive practice. Neither side of the contemporary abortion debate would argue that husbands should be able to unilaterally procure abortions for their wives whom they suspected of infidelity.

Several students noted how many of the passages cited were prohibitions against murder, and that these only apply to abortion if you assume from the outset that abortion is murder. This led into discussion of the second question, regarding related issues that inform the conversation around abortion. Primary among these is the question of fetal personhood, that is, the point at which a developing fetus or post-natal child is, to borrow a definition from Tracy Lemos, “recognized by his or her society as having value, not as a commodity but as a participant in social relations.”[3] The point at which a fetus (or baby, or child) becomes a full person, then, is the point at which its rights and interests must be considered those of a member of the community—not a cluster of cells or developing life but a life in its own right. In part, this entails protections against harm.

On the beginning of personhood, biblical literature is far from clear. Several texts concern prenatal development, but they do not offer clear guidance on the value or social/legal status of gestating fetuses (or even of children). Often, the metaphors used to describe prenatal development imply a gradual process (cf. Job 10:11–12; Ps 139:13–15). A lump of clay on a potter’s wheel is not a pot. Milk with rennet added is not cheese. A skein of yarn is not a garment. All of these things change in the process of their formation and achieve their full value only upon completion.

The passage with the clearest implications for fetal personhood—which, it must be said, is not terribly clear in any absolute sense—implies that there is a strong legal distinction between fetuses in utero and adults, at the very least. In a case where a pregnant woman is struck accidentally in a fight between two men (Ex. 21:22–25), the law provides two potential responses. If the woman miscarries but is otherwise unharmed, the guilty party pays a monetary penalty.[4] Harm to the woman over and above the miscarriage, on the other hand, incurs the law of talion: eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life (v. 23–25). Again, harm to the fetus is paid with money, harm to the woman is paid in kind. This implies that a fetus is not accorded the same value or the same rights as an adult woman, but it still does not clarify when the change in status occurs. Birth is a common assumption, yet Lemos has also shown in her work on personhood that young children were not accorded the same social value and protections as adults.

If you are thinking at this point that my students were just enacting confirmation bias, don’t worry. Pro-abortion rights groups have cited the creation of Adam (Gen 2:6–7) to argue that life begins at first breath, but my students were unconvinced that this biblical precedent could be universalized as a general principle. The same was true for texts that describe YHWH forming fetuses in the womb (Ps. 139:13–16, Job 10:11–12) and calling prophets to their specific roles before they were born (Is. 49:1, Jer. 1:5, Gal. 1:15). One person’s fate being dictated before birth does not imply all people’s fates being dictated before birth, and is not one purpose of these texts to underscore the prophets’ uniqueness and special status?

This is where I connected our conversation back to Biggs’s article on conception, contraception, and abortion. After a quick overview, I opened discussion once again. I sent them into breakout rooms again with the following prompt: “If abortions were known and practiced throughout the ancient world, what accounts for their absence from the Bible? Think of as many possible reasons as you can.” Here were the results:

1. The Bible tacitly approves of abortion.

2. The Bible tacitly disapproves of abortion.

3. Women generally handled reproductive care amongst themselves. The Bible overwhelmingly conveys the viewpoints of men, who were unconcerned with (and largely unaware of) the reproductive lives of women.

By the end of the first class session, my students had come to the conclusion, largely on their own, that it is impossible to determine “the Bible’s position” on abortion, or to know if ancient Israel had a consensus position at all. Biblical texts betray no knowledge of practices of abortion that are legible as such or plausible in their efficacy. The nearest thing, a magical infidelity/paternity test with abortifacient consequences—has only patriarchal and patrilineal motivations and bears no resemblance to medicalized abortion practices attested elsewhere in the ancient world. This raised another important question: If the Bible is silent on abortion, why is it so often invoked in modern debate?

Class Session 2: The Bible in Abortion Politics

In the second class session, we moved forward from the ancient contexts of biblical composition to its interpretation and political deployment in the contemporary United States. Having destabilized the connection between opposing abortion and upholding biblical values, we now had to consider how it became so deeply entwined with them in the first place. How had the most ardently bibliocentric strains of Christianity in America come to hold it as one of their defining moral positions? How had they conscripted the Bible to their cause, and how had the pervasive belief that the Bible explicitly condemns abortion taken such firm hold in our societal ether?

The key players in this story are evangelical Christians. Prior to the late 1970s or early 1980s, abortion was broadly considered a Catholic issue, not a priority of evangelicals, other Protestants, or many other religious communities in the US.

This came as news to my students. Clearly things have changed, but when, and how, and why?

For this session’s readings, I assigned versions of the story told from different perspectives for different purposes:

• Roach, David. “How Southern Baptists Became Pro-Life.” The Baptist Standard. January 16, 2015.

• Dudley, Jonathan. “How Evangelicals Decided Life Begins at Conception.” HuffPost Religion. November 12, 2012.

• Balmer, Randall. “The Real Origins of the Religious Right.” Politico Magazine. May 24, 2014.

• Dibranco, Alex. “The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Links to White Supremacists.” The Nation (February 3, 2020).

• Martin, Michel. “How Abortion Became A Mobilizing Issue Among the Religious Right (Interview with Kristin Kobes Du Mez.” All Things Considered (NPR, May 8, 2022).

• Recommended: Pittman, Ashton. “The Christian Dominionist War on Abortion.” (Three-part series) Mississippi Free Press (January 26, 2022).

Students find it jarring enough to hear that evangelical Christians had no hard or unanimous position on abortion as little as 50 years ago, so I wanted to include at least one version of the story told from within the movement. According to David Roach of The Baptist Standard, evangelicals united against abortion in an act of corporate repentance and renewal of interest in a core biblical value. After the experience of our first class session, my students were unconvinced by this bibliocentric narrative.

In reading responses submitted before class, several students highlighted the same selection from Jonathan Dudley’s piece:

… evangelical leaders are happy to defend creative reinterpretations of the Bible when it fits with a socially conservative worldview -- even while objecting to new interpretations of the Bible on, say, homosexuality, precisely because they are new… [B]y looking at the history of how today's "biblical view on abortion" arose, one can begin to see the worldview that made it possible. In the process, it becomes apparent it is that unacknowledged worldview, and not the Bible, that evangelical opponents of abortion are actually defending.

This became the jumping-off point for our in-class discussion. What is the nature of the conservative worldview identified by Dudley here, and how does abortion fit within it and fuel it? I will not rehearse the entire class discussion, since yours will inevitably vary. In brief, each piece shows some way in which the issue of abortion is about far more than fetal life—it is inextricably tied to what the Combahee River Collective named the interlocking oppressions of American society: patriarchal, cis-heterosexist, racist, class, disability, and religious oppression.[5] Restricting abortion reinforces each of these in specific ways, while hiding them behind the sympathetic and rhetorically powerful figure of the unborn baby.[6] We had a lively discussion about which causes and connections were clearest and strongest and which seemed stretched.

These two class sessions demonstrated that biblical literature does not clearly or easily align with modern anti-abortion politics, but I thought it was also important to show that communities who read biblical texts can, have, and do take quite different positions. To conclude this topic we discussed a number of news stories I had also assigned about religious opposition to the Dobbs ruling. If I teach the course again, I will use selections from the new volume by Rebeca Todd Peters and Margaret D. Kamitsuka, Reader in Abortion and Religion: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives (T&T Clark, 2022), and its companion website, which provide a vast range of writing from personal narratives to academic studies on the intersection of religion and abortion from a reproductive justice perspective.

Further Resources

After teaching these sessions and receiving positive feedback from my students, I wrote up some thoughts in a series of blog posts titled “Abortion, The Bible, And Us.” These are aimed at non-specialists and I hope some of you might find them useful for your teaching as well.

Part One. Beginnings

Part Two: Concepts of Conception

Part Three: How Ancient babies Were made

Part Four: On Personhood

Part Five: Conducting Abortions in the Ancient World

Part Six: The Evangelical About-face on Abortion

Epilogue: How to Ask Better Questions about Abortion (and Get Better Answers)

[1] It is seldom advisable to use the phrase “the Bible” without specifying which (or better, whose) Bible is being discussed. In this case, however, the question is complicated because “the Bible” that is invoked against abortion rights exists less as a specific volume or clear canon of texts than as a cultural concept of what that volume should include or a synthetic distillation of the message it should convey. As such, in the current article I will use “the Bible” in the sense that it has in statements like “the Bible is clear about abortion.” Within the hegemonically Christian context of political discourse in the contemporary United States, it signifies a loosely defined Christian canon that is presumed to communicate a single, coherent ethical message. In contrast, I use “biblical literature” and “biblical texts” when referring to actual texts, defining it expansively to include all ancient texts that have, in the course of time, been incorporated into one or more biblical canon.

[2] Pages 1–13 in Wisdom, Gods, and Literature: Studies in Assyriology in Honour of W. G. Lambert (Andrew R. George and I. L. Finkel, eds.; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2000).

[3] Tracy M. Lemos, Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts (Oxford University Press, 2017), 11. In an upper level or graduate course I would assign chapter 5, “Visiting the Iniquity of the Father on the Son: Violence and the Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel,” from this book as well.

[4] Some legitimate ambiguities in this law and its perceived centrality to abortion ethics have led to sustained debate over its meaning. While these issues of interpretation may not come up in an undergraduate classroom, it is useful to understand them in case differences surface among students’ translations. The Hebrew text describes the consequences of striking the pregnant woman with the phrase וְיָצְאוּ יְלָדֶיהָ, lit. “so that her children come out,” Translations variously render this “so that she gives birth prematurely,” indicating a live birth, and “so that she miscarries,” indicating the opposite. These reflect two different interpretations. I would say that everything after the word “interpretations” isn’t necessary: while it is important interpretive context, I think it really falls outside of the scope of the activity. It might be helpful to say something like, “These reflect two different interpretations, which are often apparent in a particular translation’s choices,” but otherwise, the footnote is just a bit too unwieldy for a pedagogy piece.

Interpretation 1: The fight induces labor and leads to a premature but live birth. Thus, the “harm” (Heb. אָסוֹן) in the following conditions may refer to health problems for the baby and/or to injuries sustained by the woman.

Interpretation 2: The fight caused a miscarriage. In this case, the harm referenced in the conditions must be experienced by the woman alone.

Although both interpretations are theoretically possible, several contextual factors favor the latter. Classical Hebrew has a word for giving birth (ילד) that would make a likelier candidate for premature birth than יצא. Also if both baby and mother are unharmed, as the first condition would describe, what need would there be for a monetary penalty? Nevertheless, the premature birth translation remains quite prevalent, especially in translations by committees known to have conservative theological commitments (ESV, NIV, NASB, etc.), because it allows for the possibility of talionic retribution (and thus, full personhood) to apply prenatally.

The Old Greek translation also bears mention here, since its conditions relate not to additional harm beyond miscarriage, but to the status of the fetus. “22 Now if two men fight and strike a pregnant woman and her child comes forth not fully formed, he shall be punished with a fine… 23But if it is fully formed…” (translation from Larry J. Perkins, “Exodus,” in The New English Translation of the Septuagint; ed. Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright [Oxford University Press, 2007], 66). This translation, then, distinguishes between the miscarriage of a nonviable fetus incapable of surviving and a viable fetus that is (theoretically) capable of surviving. Miscarriage of a nonviable fetus incurs a monetary fine, while harm to a more developed and plausibly viable fetus requires talionic retribution: life in the case of its death and injury equal to any injury given it.

[5] This list is slightly different from that outlined in the 1977 Combahee River Statement: “we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.”

[6] This is not to say, of course, that the abortion rights and pro-choice movements have been free of racism, ableism, cis-heterosexism, and other forms of systemic oppression. Margaret Sanger was an ardent eugenicist, for example. It is not in one connection or one axis of oppression that the entanglements of abortion are understood, but in their synthesis. However, the patriarchal motivation to circumscribe the life possibilities of women and subordinate them to men’s interests through the sacralization of marriage and motherhood is perhaps the most significant and interconnected issue.

Eric J. Harvey holds a PhD from Brandeis University in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, with a specialization in Bible and the Ancient Near East. He is currently a fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies. You can follow him @blind_scholar.